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  Spock Must Die

  ( Star Trek: The Original Series (Bantam Novels) - 1 )

  Джеймс Блиш

  Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise find themselves in the middle of an undeclared war waged by the Klingon Empire... The Organians should be consulted about the war but their entire planet has disappeared – or been destroyed... Mr. Spock entered the transporter chamber. His image would be flashed to Organia by the huge machine's faster-than-light tachyons. But the experiment failed. Suddenly there were two Mr. Spocks. One of them had to be destroyed... BUT WHICH ONE?

  James Blish

  Spock Must Die

  Author’s Note

  Unlike the preceding three STAR TREK books, this one is not a set of adaptations of scripts which have already been shown on television, but an original novel built around the characters and background of the TV series conceived by Gene Roddenberry. I am grateful to the many fans of the show who asked me to tackle such a project, and to Bantam Books and Paramount Television for agreeing to it.

  And who knows — it might make a television episode, or several, some day. Although the American network (bemused, as usual, by a rating service of highly dubious statistical validity) has canceled the series, it began to run in Great Britain in mid-June 1969, and the first set of adaptations was published concurrently in London by Corgi Books. If the show is given a new lease on life through the popularity of British reruns, it would not be the first such instance in television history.

  I for one refuse to believe that an enterprise so well conceived, so scrupulously produced, and so widely loved can stay boneyarded for long.

  And I have 1,898 letters from people who don’t believe it either.

  JAMES BLISH

  Marlow, Bucks, England.

  1969

  Chapter One — McCOY WITHOUT BONES

  From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4011.9:

  We are continuing to record a navigation grid for this area of space-time, as directed. Mr. Spock reports that, according to the library, the procedure is still called “benchmarking” after ancient ordinance mapping practices laid down before the days of space flight, though these cubic parsecs of emptiness look like most unattractive sites to park a bench.

  Though we are not far by warp drive from the Klingon Empire, and in fact I am sure the Klingons would claim that we were actually in it, the mission has been quite uneventful and I believe I detect some signs of boredom among my officers. Their efficiency, however, seems quite unimpaired.

  “What worries me,” McCoy said, “is whether I’m myself any more. I have a horrible suspicion that I’m a ghost. And that I’ve been one for maybe as long as twenty years.”

  The question caught Captain Kirk’s ear as he was crossing the rec room of the Enterprise with a handful of coffee. It was not addressed to him, however; turning, he saw that the starship’s surgeon was sitting at a table with Scott, who was listening with apparently deep attention. Scotty listening to personal confidences? Or Doc offering them? Ordinarily Scotty had about as much interest in people as his engines might have taken; and McCoy was reticent to the point of cynicism.

  “May I join this symposium?” Kirk said. “Or is it private?”

  “It’s nae private, it’s just nonsense, I think,” the engineering officer said. “Doc here is developing a notion that the transporter is a sort of electric chair. Thus far, I canna follow him, but I’m trying, I’ll do mysel’ that credit.”

  “Oh,” Kirk said, for want of anything else to say. He sat down. His first impression, that McCoy had been obliquely referring to his divorce, was now out the porthole, which both restored his faith in his understanding of McCoy’s character, and left him totally at sea. Understanding McCoy was a matter of personal as well as ship’s importance to Kirk, for as Senior Ship’s Surgeon, McCoy was the one man who could himself approach Kirk at any time on the most intimate personal level; indeed, it was McCoy’s positive duty to keep abreast of the Captain’s physical, mental and emotional condition and to speak out openly about it — and not necessarily only to the patient.

  When McCoy joined the Enterprise, Kirk suspected that it had been the divorce that had turned him to the Space Service in the first place. The details, however, were a mystery. Kirk did know that McCoy had a daughter, Joanna, who had been twenty back then and for whom the surgeon had provided; she was in training as a nurse somewhere, and McCoy heard from her as often as the interstellar mail permitted. That was not very often.

  “Somebody,” Kirk said, “had better fill me in. Doc, you’ve said nine times to the dozen that you don’t like the transporter system. In fact, I think ‘loath,’ is the word you use. ‘I do not care to have my molecules scrambled and beamed around as if I were a radio message.’ Is this just more of the same?”

  “It is and it isn’t,” McCoy said. “It goes like this. If I understand Scotty aright, the transporter turns our bodies into energy and then reconstitutes them as matter at the destination.”

  “That’s a turrible oversimplification,” Scott objected. The presence of his accent, which came out only under stress, was now explained; they were talking about machinery, with which he was actively in love. “What the transporter does is analyze the energy state of each particle in the body and then produce a Dirac jump to an equivalent state somewhere else. No conversion is involved — if it were, we’d blow up the ship.”

  “I don’t care about that,” McCoy said. “What I care about is my state of consciousness — my ego, if you like. And it isn’t matter, energy or anything else I can name, despite the fact that it’s the central phenomenon of all human thought. After all, we all know we live in a solipsistic universe.”

  “A what?” Kirk said.

  “We inhabit two universes, then,” McCoy said patiently. “One is the universe inside our skulls — our viewpoint universe, as it were. The other is the phenomenal universe — but that in the long run is only a consensus of viewpoint universes, augmented by pointer readings, and other kinds of machine read-outs. The consensus universe is also a product of consciousness. Do you agree, Jim?”

  “Tentatively,” Kirk said. “Except that I find what you call the consensus universe is pretty convincing.”

  “Statistically, yes. But it breaks down very rapidly when you examine the individual data behind the statistics. All we really know is what we register inside our skulls — a theory which used to be called logical positivism. I go further: I say that there may not even be any consensus universe, and that nothing is provably real except my consciousness, which I can’t measure. This position is called solipsism, and I say that the fact of self-consciousness forces us all to be solipsists at heart and from birth. We just seldom become aware of it, that’s all.”

  “Space travel does that to you,” Kirk agreed. “Especially when you’re as far from home as we are now. Luckily, you recover, at least enough to function.”

  “Nobody ever recovers, completely,” McCoy said somberly. “I believe that the first discovery of this situation is one of the great formative shocks in human development — maybe as important as the birth trauma. Tell me, Jim: wasn’t there a moment, or an hour, in your childhood or early adolescence when you realized with astonishment that you, the unique and only Jim Kirk, were at the very center of the whole universe? And when you tried to imagine what it would be like to see the universe from some other point of view — that of your father, perhaps — and realized that you were forever a prisoner in your own head?”

  Kirk searched his memory. “Yes, there was,” he said. “And the fact that I can still remember it, and so easily, does seem to indicate that it was fairly important to me. But after a while I dismissed the whole problem.
I couldn’t see that it had any practical consequences, and in any event there wasn’t anything I could do about it. But you still haven’t answered my question. What’s all this got to do with the transporter?”

  “Nary a thing,” Scott said.

  “On the contrary. Whatever the mechanism, the effect of the transporter is to dissolve my body and reassemble it somewhere else. Now you’ll agree from experience that this process takes finite, physical time — short, but measurable. Also from experience, that during that time period neither body nor consciousness exists. Okay so far?”

  “Well, in a cloudy sort of way,” Kirk said.

  “Good. Now, at the other end, a body is assembled which is apparently identical with the original, is alive, has consciousness, and has all the memories of the original. But it is NOT the original. That has been destroyed.”

  “I canna see that it matters a whit,” Scott said. “Any more than your solipsist position does. As Mr. Spock is fond of saying, ‘A difference which makes no difference is no difference’.”

  “No, not to you,” McCoy said, “because the new McCoy will look and behave in all respects like the old one. But to me? I can’t take so operational a view of the matter. I am, by definition, not the same man who went into a transporter for the first time twenty years ago. I am a construct made by a machine after the image of a dead man — and the hell of it is, not even I can know how exact the imitation is, because — well, because obviously if anything is missing I wouldn’t remember it.”

  “Question,” Kirk said. “Do you feel any different?”

  “Aha,” said Scott with satisfaction.

  “No, Jim, I don’t, but how could I? I think I remember what I was like before, but in that I may be vastly mistaken. Psychology is my specialty, for all that you see me chiefly as a man reluctant to hand out pills. I know that there are vast areas of my mind that are inaccessible to my consciousness except under special conditions — under stress, say, or in dreams. What if part of that psychic underground has not been duplicated? How would I know?”

  “You could ask Spock,” Scott suggested.

  “Thanks, no. The one time I was in mind-lock with him it saved my life — it saved all of us, you’ll remember — but I didn’t find it pleasant.”

  “Well, you ought to, anyhow,” Scott said, “if you’re as serious about all this. He could lock Onto one of those unconscious areas and then see if it was still there after your next transporter trip.”

  “Which it almost surely would be,” Kirk added. “I don’t see why you assume the transporter to be so peculiarly selective. Why should it blot out subconscious traces instead of conscious ones?”

  “Why shouldn’t it? And in point of fact, does it or doesn’t it? That’s pretty close to the question I want answered. If it were the question, I would even submit to the experiment Scotty proposes, and ask everybody else aboard to as well.”

  “I,” said Kirk, “have been on starship duty somewhat longer than either of you gentlemen. And I will say without qualification that this is the weirdest rec room conversation I’ve ever gotten into. But all right, Doc, let’s bite the bullet. What is the question?”

  “What would you expect from a psychologist?” McCoy said. “The question, of course, is the soul. If it exists, which I know no more than the next man. When I was first reassembled by that damnable machine, did my soul, if any, make the crossing with me — or am I just a reasonable automaton?”

  “The ability to worry about the question,” Kirk said, “seems to me to be its own answer.”

  “Hmmm. You may be right, Jim. In fact, you better had be. Because if you aren’t, then every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder.”

  “And thot’s nae a haggle, it’s a haggis,” Scott said hotly. “Look ye, Doc, yon soul’s immortal by definition. If it exists, it canna be destroyed — “

  “Captain Kirk,” said the rec room’s intercom speaker.

  Kirk arose with some relief; the waters around the table had been getting pretty deep. But his relief was short-lived.

  “In the rec room, Mr. Spock.”

  “Will you relieve me, please, Captain? We are in need of a Command decision.”

  McCoy and Scott looked up in alarm. A Command decision, out here in a totally unexplored arm of the galaxy?

  “I’m on my way,” Kirk said. “What, briefly, is the problem?”

  “Sir,” the first officer’s voice said, “the Klingon War has finally broken out. Organia seems already to have been destroyed, and we are cut off from the Federation.”

  Chapter Two — BEHIND THE LINES

  From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4011.8:

  This arm of the galaxy has never been visited by human beings, nor by any of the nonhuman races known to us. Our primary mission here was to establish benchmarks for warp-drive flight, and secondarily, of course, to report anything we encountered that might be worth’ scientific investigation. But now, it would appear, we cannot report at all.

  As Kirk entered the bridge, Spock arose from the command chair and moved silently to his own library-computer station. Sulu was at the helm, Lieutenant Uhura at the communications console. The viewing screen showed nothing but stars; the Enterprise was in a standard orbit around one of them — Kirk didn’t need to care which. All deceptively normal.

  “All right, Mr. Spock,” Kirk said, sitting down. “The details, please.”

  “Very sparse, Captain, and more seem impossible to come by,” the first officer said. “What little I have is all public knowledge — I have refrained from calling Starfleet Command for obvious reasons. There have been no ‘incidents’ with the Klingon Empire for over a year, but it now appears that they have mounted a major attack on the Federation along a very broad front — without any prior declaration, naturally. The reports Lieutenant Uhura has received state that Federation forces are holding, but I suggest that we place little confidence in that. Public announcements under such circumstances are always primarily intended to be reassuring, secondarily to mislead the enemy, and may contain only a small residuum of fact.”

  “Of course,” Kirk said. “But such an outbreak was supposed to have been made impossible under the Organian Peace Treaty. We should know; we were on Organia when the treaty was imposed, and we saw the Organians immobilize both parties in what would otherwise have been a major naval engagement.”

  “That is true, of course. However, Captain, not only have the Organians failed to intervene this time, but no contact whatsoever can be made with the planet. It seems virtually to have disappeared from the face of the universe. In the absence of any more data, I think we must assume it is destroyed.”

  Sulu turned partially in his helmsman’s chair. “Now how is that possible?” he said. “The Organians were creatures of pure thought. They couldn’t be destroyed. And it wasn’t just one battle they stopped — they simultaneously immobilized fleets all over the galaxy.”

  “The Organians themselves were thought-creatures,” Spock said, “and no doubt much of what we ‘saw’ on their planet was the result of hypnotism. But we have no real reason to suppose that the planet itself was an illusion; and if it was not, it could be destroyed. What effect that would have on the Organians, we have no idea. All we know is that they have not intervened in the present war, nor does there seem to be any way to find out what has happened to them.”

  “Well,” Kirk said, “let’s see what our problem is. We’ve got the whole Klingon Empire between the Enterprise and the Federation — including all seventeen Star bases. On the other hand, the Klingons don’t know we’re here, on their blind side; we might make some capital out of that. Lieutenant Uhura, what are the chances of getting some sort of instructions from Starfleet Command without giving our presence away?”

  “Practically nil, Captain,” the Bantu girl said. “Even if we send a query as a microsecond squirt, we’d have to send it repeatedly and at high gain in order to have any hope of one such pip
being picked up. We’ve got the whole of Shapley Center, the heart of the galaxy, between us and home, and the stellar concentration is so high there that it makes a considerable energy bulge even in subspace. To get through all that static, we’d have to punch out the pips regularly to attract their attention — and that would attract the Klingons as well. They wouldn’t be able to read the message, but they’d be able to pinpoint out location all too easily.”

  “All right,” Kirk said. “Send out such a pip irregularly; Mr. Spock, please give Lieutenant Uhura a table of random numbers from the computer that she can use as a timetable. Probably it won’t work, but we should try it. In the meantime, we have to assume that whatever we do is entirely up to us — and that if we’re to be of any help at all to the Federation, we’ll have to do it fast. I assume to begin with that we can rule out trying to circumnavigate the whole Klingon Empire.”

  “I would certainly agree,” Spock said. “By the time we completed such a trip, or even got within safe hailing distance of the Federation or any Starbase, the war would probably be over.”

  “We could try to smash our way directly through,” Sulu said. “We do have a lot of fire-power, plus the advantage of surprise. And on this side, the Empire is hardly fortified at all — think what a mess we could make of their supply bases, their communications, their whole rear echelon. It would be all out of proportion to the amount of damage a starship could do in a conventional battle situation, against matched enemy forces.”

  “It would also,” Kirk said grimly, “get us ambushed, eventually.”

  “Maybe not for a long while,” Sulu said. “We could do it hit-and-run. I could plot us a course — maybe using a random-number table again — I’d defy any computer to predict.”

  “You couldn’t do that and hit important targets at the same time,” Kirk said, “or work closer to the Federation; and if the course isn’t truly random, it can be predicted. And the closer we got to the Federation the closer we’d get to the battle front on the wrong side. We’d be blown out of space before we could cross.”